UPDATED: Another awful Rasmussen poll

Not surprisingly, the GOP's favorite pollster Scott Rasmussen showed up on The O'Reilly Factor last night (it's his base), where he continued to misrepresent one of his wildly misleading polls. But hey other than that, he's a great pollster.

As we keep detailing, Rasmussen's recent polling questions about whether investigations surrounding terror arrests in the U.S. should be handled by the military as a terror act, or civilian authorities as a criminal act makes no sense. Zero. None. Why? Because it's not an either/or choice. i.e. Acts of terror are criminal acts. Also, "civilian authorities" (read: FBI, DOJ) have been handling terrorist investigations for generations, and certainly handled them after 9/11.

In other words, civilian authorities launch terrorist investigations all the time, so why does Rasmussen pretend that only "military authorities" do that? (And if Rasmussen was trying to determine if American thought the Christmas Day bomber suspect should be tried in a military tribunal, than Rasmussen should have asked that. He did not.)

Behold Rasmussen on O'Reilly last night:

The number who want this guy treated by the military is higher than the number we found for the Fort Hood shootings a little while ago. Why? Well, there now have been two events. Overall, the American people are coming to believe that our system has shift shifted too far in the direction of protecting individual rights at the expense of national security. And the numbers are pretty dramatic. They'd been moving a lot in the last few months.

So based on a poorly worded and deeply misleading poll question, Rasmussen is able to divine all kinds of insights regarding how Americans now think our legal system leans too far towards "protecting individual rights at the expense of national security"?

No wonder he's the GOP's favorite pollster.

UPDATED: Loved this comment from Rasmussen on Fox News last night, as he defended his firm's work:

We had a great cycle for the presidential year.

Flashback: In very late October of 2008, on the eve of Obama's electoral rout, Rasmussen had Sen. John McCain closing the gap to just three points. One week later, McCain lost by more than twice that.

UPDATED: Rasmussen is out with yet more great-news-for-GOP poll results. How does he do it?

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EricBoehlert
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A Senior Fellow for Media Matters, Boehlert is the author of Bloggers On the Bus: How The Internet Changes Politics and the Press, and Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. Previously, he wrote on staff for Salon and Rolling Stone.

On December 7, President-elect Donald Trump named Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Media should take note of Pruitt’s climate science denial, his deep ties to the energy industries he will be charged with regulating, and his long record of opposition to EPA efforts to reduce air and water pollution and combat climate change.

President-elect Donald Trump has picked -- or considered -- nearly a dozen people who have worked in right-wing media, including talk radio, right-wing news sites, Fox News, and conservative newspapers, to fill his administration. And Trump himself made weekly guest appearances on Fox for a number of years while his vice president used to host a conservative talk radio show.